


Campfire Tale for the End of Days

by Stultiloquentia



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, Origin Story, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-10
Updated: 2009-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-02 04:26:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stultiloquentia/pseuds/Stultiloquentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Slayer origin story. "So. A very long time ago, Demons walked the earth. Stomped, also. Flew. Slithered, swam, percolated, oozed."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Campfire Tale for the End of Days

**Author's Note:**

> [commentary track on livejournal](http://stultiloquentia.livejournal.com/48356.html)

So. A very long time ago, Demons walked the earth. Stomped, also. Flew. Slithered, swam, percolated, oozed. I don't mean the puny hybrids nowadays passing for demigods—the bogeymen, vampires, jinn. I mean the big ones, undiluted, uncontained. Demons the size of space stations, teeth and tentacles looped, looped again and swarming. Grumpy buggers, largely. Took up obscene amounts of space, made life hard for other earthly beasts and beings evolving best they could in the cracks and puddles of their castles.

A long time ago, humans walked, too, and they were much as they are and always will be: smallish, weak, forever teetering on the proverbial clever/stupid divide, but weirdly good at collaborating. Better than demons, at any rate. So they did that, collaborated, collected some spells, cultivated some heroes, went to war. The ants go marching. Had help from a few angels. You ever seen an angel fight? Try not to.

From Earth they banished the pure demons. But one of the last, in a mad bid to remain in this our comparatively cheery dimension, took his human foe by the neck and bit him, drained him dry, and forced his own essence into the ravished human shell. The corpse, held from dusty death by the inscrutable laws of blood sacrifice, arose, and slew and ate in turn another human warrior to be a vessel for the Old One. Thus vampires came to be.

Humankind either failed to notice or agreed to ignore, at first. Weary of battles, they retreated to their sentinelled valleys to heal and rebuild their race. Time passed. Without, the vampires multiplied like dogs.

One rose to prominence. She was strong and sly, fond of blood, but fonder still of tricks and games. Liked the kill, but loved the hunt. She dreamed true, for that's a gift given even to monsters, now and then. Her right name is lost, but I'll call her Aur.

Aur hunted far and wide for unnumbered years, until she came upon a tribe of humans ruled, as is often the case in such stories, by three brothers. The first brother was renowned for his strength, but Aur didn't care. She killed him in combat, or so one might say had the battle lasted longer than one kick to the head and a snap of Aur's jaws. The second brother was renowned for his swiftness, but what of that? When he sought her out to avenge his kin, she killed him, too, rush crunch chomp.

The third brother was renowned for his gentleness. As the people mourned their heroes, the youngest prince travelled from house to house, offering gifts and words of comfort to his subjects. He spent long hours with his guards and wizards, refining patrols and devising charms of protection and healing. Then, satisfied that his holdings were as safe as they could be, he sought out his foe.

Single combat was not his aim. He set traps. He laid ambushes. Aur liked this, thought it was fun. She sprang his traps and killed his huntsmen, took hostages and bartered them like kine. He almost caught her, sometimes. More frequently she almost slaughtered him, for, as the prince was no stay-at-home coward, they did meet face to face betimes. He was wise, and she was wise, and so they danced for many months.

In time, respect grew between them. Their morals would never align, but each had skills for the other to admire, and both, in their secret hearts, enjoyed their skirmishes, for where else could they find an opponent so skilled and daring? Aur's respect for the clever prince grew into something else. She grew to love him.

Court him she did not, for Aur was no fool. Even had she not slaughtered his brothers and half his town, she knew well the prince was wed and had brats. But when she lay alone in her lair and thought of him, her blood roiled.

For a while Aur thought she could bottle her frustration, but passion waits for man nor monster. "Enough!" said she, at last. "I'll be slave to this game no more!" So again she sought out the prince, forced him to combat, and this time she slew him. His brothers she had drained and left to rot, but him she turned to be like herself. "I'll make you my consort and you shall love me forever," Aur thought.

But Aur was in for a surprise, for the demon who rose in her arms was most manifestly not the man she had slain, but a cold-limbed beast with a maw full of fangs and a misshapen heart. No fawning consort he, but disdainful and cruel-mouthed, with taste for no kind of sport but torture and slaughter. And slaughter he did. Raped his family and killed them, killed his friends, and when he found that everyone else had belatedly locked their doors, he went after the town's goats.

Then Aur did something odd. She saw, with the brutal clarity of revelation, what she was. Then she looked around her, and saw that the living world was a place of beauty and ugliness, but always changing and always in balance, for all things fair and foul must die. But she was beyond this Law, as even the Old Ones had not been, for she had taken beauty and befouled it, destroyed but could never create, and would not gift her long-dead body to the earth. And her wretched offspring was the same. And the vampire repented, as none before had done.

Then she took it on herself to kill the thing she'd ruined, and she set off after her ill-fated love. The prince fled, and Aur gave chase, until at length they came upon a town ravaged by a clutch of vampires, and there Aur chose to let her single quarry go, and deal instead with the greater, hungrier threat. She slew all the monsters in the town with a rosewood stake, and the people watched behind their windows and wondered at their unsettling savage saviour. They called her Slayer.

Aur was well satisfied by the fight. She wandered from town to town, still seeking the prince, but stopping now wherever she found vampires to slay. Still, she was restless, for wherever she went, her foes seemed to multiply, and the faces of the humans were grim and weary.

After a while, Aur, too, grew weary, and her steps carried her back whence she had come. After long thought, she sent a message to the sagest wizard in her old love's town, and two more to wizards of neighbouring tribes. "I have a proposition," she said, and she signed it, "Slayer." The three wizards, fearful, but intrigued, agreed to meet the Slayer, provided she would come to a sacred ground where she could do them no harm. And so they did.

"The world is full of demons," said Aur without preamble. "Their numbers grow, and the Balance shifts, for they take from the world and give nothing. How will you fight them?" The wizards had no answer. "I will make you an army," said Aur. "Give me a spell. When I drink the blood of a man, and he in turn drinks me, my demon soul invades his body and forces hence what's human. Make me a spell that lets the demon go from me to a warrior of my choosing, without blood sacrifice. Let me give my demon to a human who, ensouled, is fit to wield its strength."

The three wizards consulted with each other, for they liked the thought of harnessing the vampire's strange magic, and they agreed that they could make a spell. So Aur chose a girl, hale and strong, at the height of her female power, but young and unfixed in her ways, and brought her to the sacred circle. She bit the girl and sipped to forge a bond, but ceased after a mouthful. Turning her fangs to her own flesh, she tore a wound and pressed the girl's lips to it.

But the three wizards, out of fright, betrayed her. The girl drew, and drew again. After a moment Aur said, "Cease!" but the girl did not. Aur tried to pull away, but both were caught fast by the spell, and the vampire felt her demon rushing through her, out into the mortal child, out, out until she was drunk dry and nothing remained. "You accursed fools!" cried Aur in despair. But had she other words of vengeance or of warning to impart, she spoke them not, for she was dust.

The wizards had their slayer, but no army. One pet warrior, endowed with demon strength and Mummu knows what other dark qualities, is not so hard to contain and control as one hundred sisters. They were well pleased. Their spell was finely wrought indeed, for the blood sacrifice had not been shorn, but merely shifted to Aur's own death, and the death of the girl, in turn, would pay for the next slayer's making.

The girl became the wizards' secret. Under their tutelage she grew into a fierce fighter, and a shadowy legend among her former kin. In time she forgot her name and the people called her Slayer. She roamed wide, seeking out especially the progeny of her maker, whom she had learned to loathe. She killed all but one: Aur's last. The clever prince always escaped.

As for him, his line in time became known as Aurelius, strong and blood-mad, scourges and masters. Yet many of them had strange fates.

The watchers and the demons both have forgotten much, by accident and by choice, but they are not the only storytellers in the world. Some say that Aur has the choosing of each new slayer, and chooses each time in hopes the girl will shed her chains and avenge her sire. Among those whose business it is to keep rumours alive, this, too, remains: a sly, small trace of a legend, less prophesy than poesy, that the lines must one day reconverge. The Slayer shall love an Aurelian blood-child, and abandon the light for want of him, or else the prince's heir shall hear her call and prove of mettle stronger than his forebear. All good tales have symmetry.

So. In the beginning the vampire, for love of a man, became the Slayer. And so shall the line end when the Slayer breaks the strangle-curse of the wizards to forge her army, and a vampire, for love of her, becomes a man.


End file.
